Enabling web service request citation by provenance information

Abstract

Geoscience Australia (GA) is a government agency that delivers much scientific data via web services for government and research use. As a science agency, the expectation is that GA will allow users of its data to be able to cite it as one would cite academic papers allowing authors of derived works to accurately represent their sources. We present a methodology for assisting with the citation of web service requests via provenance information recording and delivery. We decompose the representation of a web service request into endurant and occurrent components, attempting to source as much information as possible about the endurant parts as organisations find these easiest to manage. We then collect references to those parts in an endurant ‘bundle’, which we make available for citation. Our methodology is demonstrated in action within the context of an operational government science agency, GA, that publishes many thousands of datasets with persistent identifiers and many hundreds of web services but has not, until now, provided citable identifiers for web service-generated dynamic data.